This is a very, very bad bus book – for the first few chapters, there is almost no respite from the funny. It does, however, read more like a blog entry than a book. I love a good swear frenzy as much as the next person, but even I had had enough of “fuck” by book’s end.

You don’t have to be a fan of The Bloggess to enjoy her memoir – I only started reading the blog after I’d finished this book. And it’s an excellent read, full of lo-embarrassingly-l moments. It’s not perfect; her life is interesting and unique, but the emotions behind them aren’t exactly original – I don’t need to be constantly told how amazingly crazy her life is, I can judge it for myself. And, like most of these comedy memoirs, it starts out strong, but peters out a bit near the end. But it’s not really aiming to be the next great American novel, so why complain?

You may have noticed that I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately, including Holocaust memoirs, sad Irish memoirs, drug addiction memoirs, and being women in comedy memoirs, and I started thinking about why the authors feel all these different stories need to be told. For McCourt, his prose is the standout. Most Holocaust memoirs serve to inform, warn, and give dignity and respect to the victims. The women in comedy memoirs are either written forms of their standup acts, or sort of “you can do it, too” women-power screeds. The Bloggess may not be a professional comedian (and that’s debatable), but the purpose of this memoir is definitely entertainment. This paragraph doesn’t have a conclusion or anything, I just thought it was interesting to think about.

Also, how bizarre to read this almost immediately after Bossypants – an odd childhood with an eccentric father, both were stabbed in the face as kids, chapters on the hilarity and eww-yness of motherhood and jobs. I dunno, I was getting an odd sense of deja vu there.